A small silver coin found at the Cupids Cove Plantation Provincial Historic Site in eastern Newfoundland may be the oldest English coin ever found in North America.
The coin, discovered during the latest season of annual excavations at the site, is a Henry VII ‘half groat’, believed to have been minted in Canterbury, UK, some time between 1493 and 1499.
The colony at Cupids Cove Plantation was established in 1610 by John Guy, a merchant from Bristol, and is one of the earliest English settlements in North America. But this coin was in circulation for many years and must have passed through many hands before it was lost here in the early 17th century, thousands of miles from the town where it was minted more than a century earlier.
